Footscray Scores Again

With and With Each Other is now located on corner of Nicholson Street and Ballarat Road in Footscray. It is by the American sculptor, Tom Bills, professor of art and art history at University of California at Davis and a disciple of the father of hardcore sculptural minimalism, Donald Judd.

Tom Bills, With and With Each Other, 1998

I have previously written about two other sculptures in Footscray: Bruce Armstrong’s Two Person’s Hugging and Wominjeka Tarnuk Yooroom by Maree Clarke and Vicky Couzins. Footscray has scored again with this sculpture that City of Melbourne no longer wanted.

“For the past five years, With and With Each Other has sat in storage after it provoked controversy in 2002. Since then, the two giant blocks have remained hidden away at storage sheds in Clayton.” Clay Lucas, April 4, 2007 The Age.

With and With Each Other is a grey concrete minimalist sculpture of two mirror-image halves has been described as “looking like a pair of lungs” or “twin foetuses with erections.” It had been installed on a roundabout in Melbourne as part of the Construction in Process Sculpture Festival 1998 with a three-month permit but had remained on the roundabout for 4 more years. It was replaced on the roundabout at Peel and Dudley Streets by Island Wave, 2003 by Lisa Young.

Footscray isn’t a suburb that many Melbournians would associate with great public sculpture but they have never been to Footscray and hold attitudes about western suburbs that date back decades. Footscray is changing as Melbourne slowly turns west and the suburb now has an impressive collection of public sculpture. The Footscray railway station and other parts of the centre of the suburb are being redeveloped but you can still Franco Cozzo’s Furniture whose late night advertising in the 1990s has been burnt into my mind.